Issue #308 • Jul. 16, 2020

“It Is Not From Heaven,” by Jonathan Edelstein

“The Black-Eyed Goddess of Apple Trees and Farmers’ Wives,” by Erin Eisenhour

For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

IT IS NOT FROM HEAVEN

by Jonathan Edelstein

        “Hem baim,” said the fish at the bottom of Shemaiah’s boat. “They are coming.”

        Shemaiah heard and crouched down close. He had never, of course, heard a fish speak before, but nor had he ever seen a fish as uncanny as this one. In the predawn light, it was a mottled blue with a flattened tail and a profusion of fins, including two pairs of stubby ones at its base that might almost be legs. Its skin was oily—even more so than the oilfish that Shemaiah had gone out this night to catch—and there was something preternatural in its eyes.

        “Hem baim,” it said.

        “Who?” Shemaiah asked. “Who is coming?” He felt an instant’s bemusement that he was talking to a fish, but if there were fish who could speak Ivri, maybe they could also understand it. There were stranger things in Muluku Eloheinu’s world than he could imagine.

        “They are coming,” said the fish.

        For a moment, Shemaiah considered throwing the fish back. He would get nothing for it at the market—it was useless as food, and the oil that it exuded smelled foul—and though its speech was a prodigy, he could say “hem baim” as well as it could. But the Shevi’im, the Council of Seventy, would want to hear of this, so he threw it instead into the tub at the boat’s stern.

        Dawn was breaking and the oilfish had returned to the depths, so Shemaiah steered toward home. Ahead was the island that some called Eretz Yarok and others Mwali: forested mountainside, low terraced hills, the silver gleam of streams, the long beach at Miklat town. A warm breeze blew from the north and guided Shemaiah to shore, and the scene resolved into thatched roundhouses, millet fields, low mud-brick buildings and the market plaza where the Shevi’im held court.

        Yochanan the market-judge was waiting when Shemaiah pulled his boat onto the beach. “Oilfish?” he asked, and peered into the tub to begin his inspection. “These look good, this one... what is that?”

        And the fish began to tell stories.

* * *

        It was still talking to a gathering crowd when the first of the Shevi’im arrived. There were three of them in masks of polished hardwood: two with artfully carved age-lines and tufts of grass attached to the temples and chin, the third clean-shaven and flatter-featured. A Chanyawa ancestor, Shemaiah thought—he didn’t know which one it was supposed to be, but he didn’t know who the Ivri ancestors were either. The Shevi’im elders guarded that secret closely in their initiations.

        “Son of man,” the fish said, “set thy face against Gog of the land of Magog, the chief priest of Meshech and Tubal.” The names were unfamiliar to Shemaiah, and the story was hard to understand; after a moment, he realized that the very language the fish was speaking wasn’t quite the one he knew. The words were Ivri, but they were the old Ivri, the one the ancestors had spoken before the books and scholars were burned, the one without any borrowings from Chichanyawa. He leaned closer, hoping the words would become clearer to him, and he was so intent that he hardly noticed the Shevi’im doing the same.

        They crouched close, and the one in the Chanyawa mask crouched closest. “Fars, Shewa and Kyrene with them,” the fish said—those were names Shemaiah had heard—and suddenly, he could see them: the air above the tub was filled with images of mounted Farsi archers and dark-skinned Shewa soldiers with wooden shields.

        “It is the true telling,” said Yochanan. “Word for word and sound for sound.” And Shemaiah knew that it was so. Yochanan was a Gatherer and a Sower—one who could collect stories and make them seen—but only if the story were told exactly as it had been first told. Only if the fish recalled this story’s words and inflections exactly as they had been spoken by the distant ancestor who invented it could Yochanan have Gathered those words and Sown their image for all to see.

        “The fish knows the lost stories,” Shemaiah said. “The stories from before the burning.”

        The three Shevi’im, now standing upright, were talking about the same thing, or more precisely, they were arguing about it. The Shevi’im always argued; sometimes there were more arguments than elders.

        “How can a fish tell the old stories?” asked one of the bearded ones.

        “It is said that when the books and the scholars were burned, their ashes were thrown in the sea,” the Chanyawa-masked one answered.

        “The ashes! No one can read ashes! Ashes cannot speak!”

        “But this fish comes from the deep places,” the third one said. “It lives in the realm of the great whale Livyatan. It is said that Livyatan hunts by boiling all the deep waters, and a creature that can survive that might see ash as we see what the ash came from.”

        “What nonsense...”

        “Fish are protected from the evil eye,” said Yochanan. “And it is said that holy men can be reborn as fish. When the Umbrians tore Abba Zeira’s skin with iron combs and cast his body in the sea, he became a great grouper and gave lessons to the fishermen.”

        Shemaiah knew that story. It was part of the lore of his craft, and an old fisherman with a Gatherer’s and Sower’s talent had shown him its image when he was a child. The Chanyawa had loved this story too, in the days when the Ivrim were their slaves; they too had tales of ancestors who became animals, and the story of Abba Zeira was one of the things that first made them see the Ivrim as kindred spirits. The fish he’d caught couldn’t be Zeira—it was an uncanny thing from the depths, not a grouper—but could there have been others?

        “Nonsense!” someone repeated, and Shemaiah saw that more of the Shevi’im had come. They were throwing their masked heads about and waving robed arms like Gatherers who’d forgotten their stories, shouting about whether the fish was a messenger or a prophet or a demon.

        “It is warning us!” said one. “‘They are coming’—the men of Fars and Shewa and Kyrene.”

        “And if they’re coming, then so? They weren’t the ones who burned our books.”

        “In Kyrene there was burning.”

        “And from Kyrene on the Great Green Sea, they will come all this way to conquer us?”

        An elder masked as a woman—Vered the Judge, perhaps, or the warrior Ekari—swung a fist at the one who’d said that. The people at the market raised a shout. The Shevi’im always bickered—it seemed sometimes that one couldn’t become an elder without a strong belief that the way to worship Muluku Eloheinu was to argue about Him—but it was rare for them to come to blows. More of them started fighting, and the people began looking at their neighbors; when the elders didn’t speak with one voice, neither did the people.

        Yochanan stepped in to break them up; he wasn’t an elder and never would be, but in this place, his authority as market-judge outweighed even that of the Shevi’im. But before he could reach them, the image of two men fighting appeared above the assembly. “Quick to anger and quick to forget, his gain is balanced by his loss,” the fish said, and the Shevi’im left off fighting to argue about this new portent.

        “The Feast of the Sparing is in two days,” Yochanan said. For a moment, Shemaiah wondered what that had to do with anything, and then he remembered. At the Feast of the Sparing, the people remembered both of the departures from Masr, and it was then that they received messages from the ancestors. Maybe then, when all the people and all the Shevi’im were gathered, they would learn why the fish had come.

        “You will guard it until then,” the man in the Chanyawa mask told Shemaiah, and Shemaiah wondered what stories it would tell in the meantime.

* * *

        Guarding the fish, at first, was no hardship. Shemaiah sold his oilfish quickly and at top price—faster and dearer, in fact, than he had ever done before. People kept coming to see the marvel he had brought, and it seemed that some of the fish’s glory reflected on him; men in their market-robes, women in dresses of woven raffia, and even masked elders treated him as if he had suddenly grown wise.

        But as the day wore on, his newfound position began to pall. The fish told the same three stories time and again—that of Gog and Magog, another about a tribe called Amalek, and the third about the destruction of the ancient Ivri city Shomron by the armies of fallen Ashur—and Shemaiah began to imagine listening to them all night as he huddled alone on the beach. And as fine as the price he’d gained for his oilfish had been, he knew that if he didn’t go to sea again, he’d have no catch to sell tomorrow and would earn no price at all.

        “Hem baim,” said the fish, and launched again into Ashur’s conquest of Shomron, and Shemaiah stood and called to the market-judge.

        “Yochanan!” he cried. “Find someone to watch the fish tonight, or I’ll throw it back in the sea.”

        “Have you lost your wits?” Yochanan put aside a dispute over the quality of woolen blankets and hurried over. “The Shevi’im have said that your fish comes from God. It is telling the lost stories. You will keep it safe.”

        “And who will keep me safe? Who will keep my children safe? I’m the only one who feeds them since Nechamah, may her memory be blessed, lost her footing on the mountain. Will the Shevi’im find money in their stores to pay me?”

        Yochanan knew the answer to that as well as Shemaiah did, and resignation replaced anger. “I know you did well today,” he said, “and you’ll do well tomorrow. Give me three zuzim, and I’ll take another three from the market-fines and pay Binyamin to stand guard till you come back.”

        Shemaiah bargained, more for form’s sake than anything else, and settled at two zuzim from him and four from the market coffers. Old Binyamin was found in the abandoned harvest-hut where he slept and brought to the market to stand watch; Shemaiah handed him the two iron coins and pushed his boat out from the beach.

        He sailed north. It was late afternoon, and there would be a few more hours to catch mullet and skate before the oilfish came out. He took his market-robe off, spread his nets, and let his boat drift before the south wind.

        After an hour, he breasted the cape at the southeastern end of Karthala, the largest and northernmost of the Four Islands. To the northwest, Karthala’s central volcano loomed eight thousand feet high and smoke rose from its caldera; due north was the open sea. Shemaiah looked into the gathering darkness, searching for signs of the invaders the fish had told of; north was where his Ivri ancestors had lived before their books were burned and they were sold as slaves, and north was where their ancient enemies also lay. He saw nothing of them there, but as the coastline receded, he learned that he wasn’t the only one searching.

        “You! You from Yarok!” someone called, and Shemaiah saw another boat passing to the south. It was a fishing boat like his, but its nets weren’t set and it was packed with many more people than it would normally carry.

        “I am Shemaiah,” he said, “if you want to call me by my name.”

        “Shemaiah, then. Is it true about the fish? That it says they are coming?”

        For a moment, Shemaiah wondered how they knew, and then he saw the signal fires burning to the south on Eretz Yarok’s mountaintop. By now, everyone on the Four Islands would know, and so would the Shevi’im who ruled each of them. If the fish’s prophecies had been a matter of argument before, they would be four times as contentious now...

        “Who are ‘they,’ then?”

        That was a question Shemaiah had asked himself many times since he’d caught the fish. It had given answers, but they were all different; the tribe of Amalek didn’t come from any of the nations that followed Gog of Magog, and Ashur, so the story said, was altogether gone. The Shevi’im were arguing over which was true, but surely they all were—if they weren’t first tellings, the fish would never have been able to Sow them in the marketplace. Maybe the fish was speaking in parables, as both Ivri and Chanyawa sages were known to do, but if so, where in the parable was the truth?

        “The fish knows. Muluku Eloheinu knows,” he said, but the boat from Karthala had turned westward again and was already merging into the twilight.

        Later, as the stars were rising, Shemaiah saw another sail far to the north. It was miles away, and he could see it just well enough to know that it was a sail and that it was triangular. He had seen such sails before in stories: when the Sowers told of the flight after the burning, when they told of the treacherous ship-captain who had sold their ancestors as slaves on the Usahil coast, the sail of his ship had looked like that.

        But the sail wasn’t headed for the Four Islands; it was bound for the great isle of the Sakalavas, and like the boat from Karthala, it was gone before Shemaiah could be sure he’d truly seen it.

* * *

        It was oilfish-time not long after, and Shemaiah steered his own boat to the south and let the signal fire guide him toward home. He hadn’t reached the beach when he heard the shouting, and when he pulled the boat ashore—next to the one from Karthala, he saw—he heard that it was coming from where Binyamin was guarding the fish. He rushed to the fireside and saw elders from four islands ready to come to blows, and old Binyamin leaning on a kapok branch and staring helplessly.

        Shemaiah looked to the old man for an explanation, but he only said, “the fish is telling another story.”

        Within the circle of Shevi’im, there was an image of a priest upbraiding thousands of tribesmen. They were gathered in long lines, clothed like the Ivrim of ancient times, and bore not a trace of Chanyawa in their features. The priest walked among them, pointing and gesticulating, and while most of their faces were tight with shame, others were pictures of sorrow.

        “And Ezra the priest stood up,” said the fish, “and said unto them: ‘Ye have broken faith, and have married foreign women. Now therefore make confession unto the God of your fathers, and do His pleasure; and separate yourselves from the foreign women and from the peoples of the land...” And in the image above it, the voices of dissent were drowned out, and shame-faced men watched as sorrowful women walked out of the city forever.

        The fish began the story again, repeating it as had the others, and over the telling, Shemaiah could hear the exultation of the elders from Karthala. The Ivrim who had refused to marry with the Chanyawa in the years of their captivity, those who had never counted the Chanyawa ancestors as part of their nation, those who cried “blasphemy” when others called God the Creator by the name Muluku—they were the ones who had settled Karthala, and now it seemed they had a champion.

        “Yes!” one of them cried. “You of Yarok and Nzwani and Maore have broken faith! You must put foreign things away.”

        “Put them away?” another elder said—one from Eretz Yarok, one whose Chanyawa blood was plain. “How would we do that now? Does the Ivri part of me send away the Chanyawa part?” There was a murmur of agreement from others among the Shevi’im and from the people gathered beyond, wives holding tightly to their husbands’ hands.

        “It’s too late for that,” said another of the Karthala men, his voice regretful behind his mask. “But we know that the stories aren’t always meant literally. You are too mixed to send the foreign blood away, but you can give up foreign ways. You can return to the pure stories, the ones the fish is telling—and we can teach you.”

        There it is, thought Shemaiah. All the bickering among the Shevi’im—all the argument over points of doctrine and law—was, in the end, about power. The fisherman had seen that play out many times. On Karthala, where they had no streams, the Shevi’im had argued for a year about the commandments relating to the building of cisterns, and it had ended with a faction of them in charge of the water supply. There had been another controversy when he was a child, one about the laws of weaving...

        “The Chanyawa are our ancestors!” shouted an elder from Nzwani. “Muluku Eloheinu gave their wisdom to us, and we won’t give it up to you!” There were more shouts of agreement and derision, more gestures, and Shemaiah realized that one of the Shevi’im from Karthala was pointing at him.

        “Ask the fisherman!” the elder said. “He saw a dhow coming from the north! They are coming, like the fish said, and the old stories will make us strong!”

        How did he know that? Shemaiah wondered. Had he said something under his breath that the elder had Gathered? But it didn’t matter how the elder knew; he did know, and the image of the lateen sail appeared above the assembly while people murmured below.

        “A dhow?” said Eleazar the blacksmith. “You didn’t need to ask Shemaiah—you could have asked me. There was a dhow at Uchanyawa when my son went to trade for iron—it had come from Sayhad to sell spices. Is that what we’re supposed to fear?”

        “If they come to Uchanyawa, they’ll come to us. And when they see who we are...”

        “When they see who you are...”

        From somewhere in the crowd, a stone arced overhead and into Ezra’s image. The ancient prophet, of course, went unscathed, but the rock continued its course into the crowd beyond. Someone cried out in anger and pain, and a second later, elders and commoners were fighting again.

        This time, the fish didn’t calm them. Yochanan called for peace, as he had before, but neither he nor his market-guards could enforce it. The guards were Chanyawa from the mainland, chosen because they were outside the factions and clan-feuds of the Ivrim, but they were outside no longer—the feud this time was about them. The fighting spread into the town, and as the moon rose over the mountainside, Shemaiah saw the first fire.

* * *

        The fish said nothing about the fires in the town. Shemaiah wondered if it saw them, and if it did, what it thought they were. What would fire look like through a veil of water—did the fish think it was a strange red starlight?

        “Hem baim,” it said, and that was no enlightenment at all.

        Later, as the fires spread, Yochanan came again, followed by a group of men armed with sticks. “Leave Binyamin here again and come with me. I can’t use the guards, so I need people with some sense.”

        “Binyamin won’t be any good if something happens.”

        “You won’t be any good either, by yourself. And nothing will happen. People have other things to fight about.”

        Not really, Shemaiah thought—it was the fish that had set them fighting, and it was the fish’s words they were fighting over. But he knew what Yochanan meant. It was no longer the fish itself that mattered, and the quarrels playing out in the burning town were older than the fish was. He accepted a spare stick from one of the men and followed where they were going.

        The stick rested uneasily in Shemaiah’s hand. He’d never been part of an army—it had been years since he’d fought at all—and he wondered how he would know what to do if it came to a battle. He sensed the same uneasiness in his new comrades; fighting together was new to all of them. The wars the Ivrim had fought since coming to the Four Islands had been amateurish affairs, and this would be no different.

        It was their good fortune that the same was true of the people in the town. The fighting there wasn’t faction against faction; it had broken down into knots of people struggling and cursing. Some had knives, and there were bodies on the street, but Yochanan’s troop far outnumbered any of them, and it proved easy to break them up and take their weapons. Keeping them apart was harder—some of the fights started again as soon as the troop had moved on, and they had to break up the same battles a second or even third time—but after midnight even the most passionate of the fighters had become exhausted and ashamed. The men who had followed Yochanan drifted apart and sought their homes in the town; Shemaiah returned to the market, found Binyamin and the fish where he’d left them, and slumped against the tub to sleep.

        Yochanan’s voice wakened him an hour later; it was still before dawn, and Yochanan loomed above him in the starlight. “You should take that fish,” Yochanan said, “and throw it back into the sea.”

        Shemaiah pushed himself up on his elbows and shook his head to clear it. “The Shevi’im told me to guard it.”

        “And look what it brought us. Take it home. Let it tell its lies to Livyatan.”

        “Are they lies? Its stories are the true telling—they have to be, or the elders couldn’t Gather them. If the fish is really from God, do we dare throw it away?”

        Yochanan knelt and brought his face close to Shemaiah, and Shemaiah suddenly recognized the meaning of its seams; Yochanan was fifty years old, an elder himself though he had never been co-opted into the Shevi’im. “Your fish knows the stories as they were first told,” he admitted. “But what if the first teller was lying, or saw wrongly? What if the dhows are coming merely to trade?”

        “What if he didn’t and they aren’t? Dare we not listen?”

        “Then we should train an army and make ourselves strong, not fight each other and make ourselves weaker. If the men in the dhows are the descendants of Amalek, then the fish is doing their work better than they could.”

        Yochanan lapsed into silence for a moment and then began speaking in Chichanyawa—a form of Chichanyawa so archaic that Shemaiah couldn’t recognize many of the words. It must be a story, Shemaiah realized—an ancient story, if the first telling had been in language so old. And when the first image of Yochanan’s Sowing appeared in the form of an ape known nowhere in Usahil, he realized how ancient it had to be—so old that it must be from before the Chanyawa migration.

        “Mombemba saw the lands that the people had cultivated, and he wanted them for himself,” Yochanan said, and in the predawn light, Mobemba the ape looked down from a tall kapok tree and surveyed the Chanyawa fields. He couldn’t face the villagers’ iron spears, so he sent a frog, a thrush, and a forest shrew to warn them that enemies were approaching from the east. The animals’ tales, too, were true tellings—recounted in language even older than the story’s—and, when faced with their prophecies, the Chanyawa argued over whether to flee or march out to meet the foe. In the end, some marched and some fled, and Mombemba’s clan feasted on their empty fields.

        Shemaiah had once heard a later version of that story; not a true telling but simply a tale to be told around the campfire. In that one, Mombemba, who had merely been a monkey, hadn’t prevailed—Ekari of the Star-Steel Sword had rallied the Chanyawa with her meteorite-forged blade and driven the monkey invaders out. But Ekari had lived during the migration and her stories were told in much newer words, and Shemaiah realized that her part was a late addition to an older story, to the original one in which the people were defeated.

        The fish, too, could have been sent by an enemy, he thought. Maybe Muluku Eloheinu wasn’t the only one who knew the ancient stories. Maybe the foes of the Ivrim knew the stories too; hadn’t they been the ones who stole them? He looked into the tank and saw the fish staring upward through the water. Had it, too, seen Yochanan’s Sowing, and what plans might it be making now?

        “I don’t know,” he said. The spell of Yochanan’s story hung in the air and, coming on top of the day’s events, had shaken Shemaiah’s certainty, but who was he to second-guess the Shevi’im? And in the back of his mind, he wondered if Yochanan’s arguments were as much about power as the elders’; after all, who but Yochanan’s market-guards would train and lead the army he’d mentioned?

        “Tonight is the Feast of the Sparing,” Shemaiah said. “The Shevi’im will bring messages from the ancestors—the ones who told the stories. There will be a sign then.”

        He wondered if the fish knew that it was a holy day, and what stories it might tell when dusk fell again.

* * *

        That day six new graves were dug in Miklat town. Few left their homes except the mourners, and even they hurried back as soon as they could; the fear and exhaustion hung so thick in the air that if Shemaiah had the talent, he might almost Gather it.

        Almost no one came to see the fish that day. It swam and bubbled in its tank and told of Amalek and Ezra and Gog of Magog, but everyone had heard those stories already, and if it had any new ones, the people weren’t sure they wanted to know. Those who did come said that they too were expecting a sign for the Sparing; some of them dreaded it, and others carried word back to the houses where elders were scheming.

        In the afternoon, the smell of cooking drifted through the town, and the people began coming out at last. They brought a long table to the marketplace and laid it silently with the symbols of the Sparing: unleavened bread, bitter herbs, lamb bone, kapok branch, fish, and sword. On mats scattered around the market they laid the feast, and around the mats, the people gathered.

        By dusk, the market looked like it might at any other Sparing, but it was also different. In other years, Shemaiah would have sat with his clan, all of them around a single mat. But now, instead of clans, the people were grouped in factions. The elders of Karthala and those who supported them were at one side of the plaza, those who had fought them on the other—and a third group, a larger one, occupied the center under the protection of Yochanan and his market-guards. Seen that way, the gathering looked less like a feast than an armed camp on the eve of war...

        A sudden drumbeat interrupted the thought, and Shemaiah saw the masked Shevi’im enter the market, leaping and dancing as they converged on the table. One of them and then another began singing, and then they all were: a true song, the story of the First Sparing, as the elders of ancient times had related it, and with all of the Shevi’im doing the Sowing, the sky above the marketplace was ablaze.

        Shemaiah knew what he would see, but he never failed to thrill at it: the suffering of the Ivrim as slaves in Masr, the plagues with which Muluku Eloheinu had exacted revenge on the Masri, the escape so hurried that the Ivri women hadn’t time to bake bread. And while the story was enacted in the sky, more elders danced below it in the guise of the plagues themselves; some were locusts, some wore raffia coverings made to look like pillars of fire, two or three together might be have been a snake or a diseased bull. They capered around the table, they danced among the people, and those in the marketplace reached out to touch the instruments of the Sparing.

        And after the First Sparing came the Second. The scene in the night sky shifted abruptly to a city square, also in Masr but many centuries later, and the people saw the black-clad priests burning the Ivri books and cried out as their ancestors had. They saw the flight to the coast, a hundred families in the dead of night leaving everything behind but the scraps of their stories, and then the sea-captain who had promised them passage to Bharat but treacherously sold them as slaves on the Usahil coast. They saw the Lamu merchant who bought the exiles and sold them on to the Chanyawa king, and the Shevi’im, in new costume, danced among them as boats, winds, men with whips.

        And then... and then, the drums beat faster, the scene above the market dissolved into a single face, and a shout of joy rose from the assembly as they recognized Dalia the Teacher. She was a Gatherer and a Sower, and when the Chanyawa king had brought her to the royal hut, she told him stories. She recited chapters from the histories of Masr and Attiki and Fars, she told him of the battles of Skandar and Calvus, and when she told, the king saw. She told him that she could show him more—that she would tell him of weapons and tactics that would win the Chanyawa a great kingdom, and that he would see them with his own eyes—but if he wanted those secrets, then the price would be freedom for the Ivrim after twenty years’ service...

        That wasn’t where the story ended, Shemaiah knew. There was more: the battles that had won the kingdom of Uchanyawa; the valor of Dalia’s brother, which the king had rewarded by reducing the twenty years’ indenture to ten; the boats that her half-Chanyawa son Eleazar the Carpenter had built to carry the exiles to the Four Islands at last. But this year, those parts of the story did not get told, because the fish leaped all at once from its tank and cried “Abomination!”

        Silence fell even before the fish returned to the water; there were no drums, no songs, no dancing. The story of the Second Sparing flickered and disappeared, and the stars overhead looked no different from all other nights.

        Even those from Karthala didn’t speak. They had welcomed the fish, they had spoken against all things foreign, but even they remembered the Second Sparing and even they revered Dalia. To hear the fish speak thus about a woman who the Ivrim called the second Esther...

        “Yes, an abomination to heaven!” called a young man—not one from Karthala but of their faction, and now speaking the words that they didn’t dare. Shemaiah could see others gathering their courage to support him or shout him down, and he knew that if the fighting broke out again, even Yochanan would be powerless to stop it. He’d hoped for a sign at the Sparing, but not for this one.

        And then, suddenly, he heard a story.

        No, he didn’t hear it—he knew it. The ancestors were supposed to speak to the Shevi’im at the Sparing feast, but it seemed they had spoken to him instead, and a story he’d never heard was full-formed in his mind. And he shouted, “It is not from heaven!”

        Silence fell again, and the story spilled out of him.

        Shemaiah had never been a Gatherer or a Sower—he lacked both the training and the talent—but this one night he was both, and his words formed a scene over the marketplace. It was a scene from centuries ago in al-Shams, with robed Ivri scholars arguing over whether an impure oven could be made pure again. One of them, opposed by the others, asked for proof from a tree, a stream, and a wall, and at his command, the tree walked across the path, the stream flowed backward, and the wall bent low above the scholars, but each time, his opponents refused to accept the proofs as valid. Finally, he said “may a proof come from heaven,” and the voice of Muluku Eloheinu—though the sages didn’t call Him that in those days—said “he is right.”

        “And then,” said Shemaiah, “the sage Joshua rose and said ‘it is not from heaven.’ The words have been given to us; let us decide.”

        Above, in the sky, the voice from heaven laughed and said “My children have defeated Me,” and on the ground, in the market square, the watchers understood. There were to be no more signs from heaven, not in the form of a tree or a stream or even a fish; the Ivrim had their stories and their wisdom, and if their faith told them to face traders from the north together and that Chanyawa blood made them stronger, that was theirs to decide.

        Shemaiah knelt by the fish-tank. “Someone help me carry this,” he said, hoping that wouldn’t break the spell; Yochanan, with the same hope clear on his face, put his hands under another part of it and waved to two more of his followers to do likewise.

        No one stood in their way as they carried the tank to Shemaiah’s boat and helped him push it off into the water. If the quarrel broke out again after that, Shemaiah didn’t know.

* * *

        Miklat town had long since faded to the south when Shemaiah put his boat at anchor, and only the mountaintop remained as a looming shadow. He hoped the Ivrim would do well under Yochanan’s rule; the Shevi’im would argue endlessly about what had just happened, but Yochanan seemed to know his own mind. The Ivrim had had a time of judges before, and it hadn’t worked out badly. Maybe this time would be no worse.

        He reached into the wooden tank and put his hands on the fish. “Hem baim,” it said. “They are coming.”

        Shemaiah lifted it and looked into its eyes as he cast it into the sea. “Tell them we are here.”

Copyright © 2020 Jonathan Edelstein

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Jonathan Edelstein is forty-seven years old, married with cat, and living in New York City. In addition to BCS, his work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and the Lacuna Journal, and he blogs occasionally at www.haibane.info/author/jonnaomi/. He counts Ursula Le Guin and Bernard Cornwell among his inspirations, and when he isn’t writing, he practices law and hopes someday to get it right.

Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies

THE BLACK-EYED GODDESS OF APPLE TREES AND FARMERS’ WIVES

by Erin Eisenhour

        My favorite story as a child was the one about the farmer who slits open his wife’s belly and plants an apple tree amongst her insides.

        Mind you, the wife is long dead by the time the entrails come into play (the story loses a great deal of its romance when you skip over that fact, and I am partial to romance). She is a practical person and, stretched out on her deathbed with all her bones jutting out of her skin, she loudly insists that she will under no circumstance permit her body to languish in a lovely pine box when it can serve a far more useful purpose—such as sprouting a tree in the back garden, preferably one that will complement the peonies and grow tall enough to block the sun from reaching the Ling’s plot next door.

        “Never did like those turnip-pushers much,” the farmer’s wife mumbles before her heart gives out. I think the farmer says something too, but that’s not important.

        In some versions of the story it’s these same turnip-pushers who tear the tree up by the roots and burn it; an act sometimes painted as vengeance, sometimes a restoration of honor (the moral gets muddied in all the smoke and excitement). In others it’s Tian, god of great heights, jealous of the reach of the apple tree’s branches. Sometimes it’s even the poor wretched farmer himself, buried in a snug little box patched together from the tree’s soft wood. I, again being in favor of romance, prefer the fourth version, in which the apple tree outlives them all and sits in an overgrown tangle of rhododendrons and yellow-speckled peonies to this very day.

        No matter how you tell it, it’s a much better story than the one the shaman is telling me right now about the Jade Empress and her demigod son Nu, patron of youth, untimely death, and filial obligations, tamer of tigers, etc., etc. I am tempted to ask the shaman if Nu really did try to fuck a pine tree like in the myths (admittedly, it was a very handsome pine tree, bristly like freshly grown chin whiskers), but my mother’s stricken expression keeps my mouth shut.

        “All this to say,” the shaman concludes in a reedy voice, “think of today not as a day of sorrow but as a day of rejoicing. This is the highest honor any young woman can hope to attain in a mortal life. Serve the gods well and you may even attain your own seat in the Pantheon.”

        I smirk down at my bare toes. In my head I conjure up a delightful image of my own face cast in gold with glossy black pearls in place of eyes. Smoke wreathes my head like a crown as neighbors and strangers alike kneel at my feet, bowing and scraping to the immortal Bi, patron of missed curfews, lost slippers, and neglected responsibilities, cracker of ill-timed jokes, etc., etc.

        The shaman does not notice the fine glaze that has shifted over my eyes. He speaks directly to my mother now—when he can edge a word in, that is. Every few seconds another hiccupping sob jerks her body and he is forced to cut his sentence short and pat her hand. I fiddle with the hem of my sleeve, watching the chickens skulk about the front garden through two slats of wood in the far wall. Kuen—the baby the midwives ripped open my sister to retrieve—totters about on unstable legs, collecting fistfuls of tufty white feathers in his pink pudgy hands.

        Really, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Shamans drag away poor farm girls from the outlying provinces all the time (particularly in seasons of great calamity, as everyone insists we are in now). Even then their lives stray little from their previously charted course. They trade mud thatch and straw for cedar wood and oil, reborn as sworn sisters, plodding away the rest of their days with too many early rises.

        Then again, my heavenly sanctioned calling is a smidge more exacting than a life of poverty and celibacy. If the watery gray dregs of the teacup set before me are to be believed, I’m to cure the plum pox by praying, fasting, and letting the shamans tear out my heart and eat its ashes—not necessarily in that order (though I have my personal preferences) but certainly by the end of the month.

        I avert my eyes as the shaman pays me some compliment about the shape and softness of my hands—very befitting of my sex, he assures me, as my mother, embarrassed, buries her own hands beneath her sash—and I barely manage to smother my laughter. His tongue keeps darting across his lips in a way that reminds me of the black asps with their jewel box eyes that infest the countryside during the hot murky months of summer. I’ve beheaded plenty of them with my spade out in the garden, but this particular specimen, I decide, will require a more delicate touch. Still, it is all I can do not to raise my head and meet the shaman’s gaze with a defiant glare. Like an itch in the small of the back, the world can’t rid itself of me so easily.

        He mistakes my silence for shyness—or, worse, humility.

        “Speak, child,” the shaman urges. “What have you to say to this glorious calling?”

        “I am deeply honored to have found the favor of the gods,” I say with as much graciousness as I can muster, all the while keeping my eyes set at a demure angle that never strays above the shaman’s knees. “An honor far beyond what a simple peasant girl such as myself could ever expect from the world.”

        My mother blinks at me in stunned silence. Instinctively, she presses the back of her hand to my forehead. The lines that encircle her drooping mouth only deepen when she realizes that my skin is quite cool, my heart plugging along at its usual lethargic pace. Brace yourself, I think.

        The shaman’s lips peel back in a reptilian smile. His gums are black from the bitter tea the shamans use for scrying—the kind they mix up with vetiver roots and ashes.

        “Your words make my heart smile,” he says, and his voice drips with sweet oil and venom. “I think the Pantheon is well within your reach. But, forgive me—” The tip of his pink tongue skirts his lips. “I must now ask a somewhat... delicate question. Standard procedure, of course. The maiden, I trust, is indeed still a maiden...?”

        His sentence trails off as he ducks his head in a sign of deference to my mother. She cuts her crying short. Something about this breach in propriety revives her. As she gathers her strength, her face purples and swells, twisting into an indignant expression that proudly declares as if there was any need for such a question!

        I raise my head to meet the shaman’s crinkled eyes and offer him a honeyed smile as I at last answer this gambit with one of my own. “About that—”

        My mother yanks me up by the collar. “What?”

        Her voice is so loud and shrill that it wakes my father, asleep for so long that we’d all forgotten he was even there. His head dips forward and, to the accompaniment of a sharp cry of surprise, slams against the low table. The half-empty bottle set before him tips over the table’s edge and meets the floor in a spray of green glass.

        My mother is still shaking me, my toes barely brushing the floor, but I manage to turn my head and meet the shaman’s gaze, flush with triumph.

        “Since that appears to disqualify me,” I gasp through my mother’s stranglehold, “I won’t waste a moment more of your time. Here, allow me to show you the way out.”

        As if he could somehow lose his way in our little three-room farmstead.

        But something is wrong. Something hangs in the air, more clinging than the humidity. The shaman’s cool façade does not slip for a second. He stares at me with his too-pronounced brows arching up into his forehead, looking at me the way a teacher does a young student who has just completed a sum and—oh, how silly—marked a two where there should be a four.

        “Not to worry, my dear,” he assures me. “The mistakes of youth will not follow us into the next life, so why let them haunt us in this one? Besides, we have certain... procedures now to compensate for any such blemishes that might otherwise tarnish the gods’ chosen Elect.”

        I cannot work the muscles in my mouth. My father stares blankly at the shaman, then at the puddle of glistening green glass on the floor, as my mother wrings her hands around her handkerchief. In this horrible silence it is easy to make out the slight hum of an insect’s wings. A fly slips through a crack in the door, spiraling overhead before settling on my cheek. The shaman sees it, too. He stretches his arm out and, smiling, pinches it between two fingers.

* * *

        The nice thing about inking your death on the calendar a few decades earlier than anticipated is that it gives you an easy out of all kinds of otherwise unavoidable social obligations—weddings, court summons, and the like. Sorry, Aunty Feng. Would if I could, Uncle Yu. But something tells me the other girls won’t appreciate me oozing puss and blood all over the skirts of their shiny new ruquns. Alright, if you insist, so long as my severed head gets its own cushion—oh, I see you’ve changed your mind.

        As the ones who ushered me into life, my parents are permitted to accompany me on my journey out of it, even behind temple walls. My mother flutters and ferrets about the house all night in preparation, flinging sleeping shifts and teacups and mud-caked work clogs indiscriminately into a single trunk, only for the shaman to inform us as we load into the wagon the next morning that the temple shall be providing for us ‘in perpetuity’ (and, anyhow, there is nothing to be gained from an over-attachment to the material). In the end she leaves the trunk on our doorstep, where the chickens pick at the faded leather.

        My fiancé Yusheng catches us at the front gate in order to impress a last-minute bribe on the shaman, his red commissioner’s robes hitched up about his knees from the three-mile sprint from town through the rice paddies. Yusheng is especially put out by the whole “Elect” business because now he’s short a wide-eyed girl-bride, and they’re in short supply in Pingli Province, what with the plum pox making the rounds again.

        “And, not to mention...” Yusheng puffs, “I have friends in the magistracy... who would be more than happy to... to compensate you for any inconvenience this might cause.”

        The shaman peers into the little leather purse with its limp red tassel that Yusheng has proffered. With a sympathetic smile he tips it over. Coins spill onto the ground, and the chickens swarm, mistaking them for bread crumbs. Returning the purse to its owner, the shaman mounts the front of the wagon (my father slips uneasily into the seat beside him) and nudges the two mules into motion. Yusheng stands rooted to the spot.

        It is hard for my mother to see him go—especially after all the teas and smiles and belly-crawling it took to make such a respectable match—but as I watch him sink into the rising red-brown slope of the road I bid Yusheng farewell with a gesture vulgar enough to make a twice-widowed commissioner blush.

* * *

        I sprawl in the straw in the back of the cart staring listlessly at the passing swells of white pine forests, the country quiet punctuated by my mother’s sudden outbursts as she works her way through a list of every young bachelor in the province who I could have compromised myself with (at this point I can’t bring myself to tell her he doesn’t exist). The wagon slogs along, unaware of the pain each forward movement inflicts on my spine. Steady rains have left the roads in a sorry state, and the wagon wheels are only worsening the problem, churning the loose soil into a thick, earthy stew.

        The only person enjoying themselves is Kuen. He really is an ugly baby, I think, though he isn’t truly a baby anymore. It’s miraculous how little of my sister is in that fat red face, considering the price of admission for its entry into the world.

        Kuen notices my stare. His cheeks puff out and a toothy grin scrunches up his eyes. I pinch his big toe, and something about this coupled with the wolfish smile twisting my lips puts him in an impossible fit of giggles. That’s right, you smug little bastard, I coo in a honeyed voice in my head, you know what you did and you’re prouder for it.

        My mother glares at me, sweeping Kuen up in her arms and squeezing a cheek until he quiets. I sneak a wink at him. As Kuen struggles to imitate me, I think to myself that there isn’t anyone I hate more in the world, except maybe Yusheng and his perpetually sweating upper lip.

        “What about the Shu boy?” my mother prattles on. “Oh, what was his sun sign again?”

        “The Vernal Equinox, I think,” I answer dully.

        “Ah, I should have known!” she declares, and then she sees something in my face that makes her start sniffling again, her grip on Kuen tightening.

        “You know, when I was a boy,” my father says, lifting his hat an inch, “we didn’t bother with any of this mystic bullshit when a fever caught. We just died.”

        “Right,” I say. “And now all your family is dead and you’re an alcoholic.”

        “What was that?” he asks just as the wagon jolts and he sloshes rice wine down his front, eliciting a disapproving hiss from my mother.

        It’s in moments like these where I cannot help but think that marriage between a demigod and a pine tree seems just as likely as that between the man and woman seated beside me.

        “Can you really stop the plum pox?”

        This last statement is from Hulin, one of the young soldiers serving as our escort, though he’s half a head shorter than the others. His ears are lopsided and he reminds me more of a puppy than a hardened killer, but he is not drunk or hysterical or Kuen, so it’s his company I prefer.

        “By letting them chop up my heart, yes,” I say warmly.

        Hulin blanches, to my surprise. I figured he was just as keen on this sacrificial business as the shaman.

        “Apparently Nu visited the shaman in his dreams,” I continue. “Told him to follow the stars straight to Pingli. Then the rest of the signs turned up in my tea leaves—”

        “Did you know that some scholars think the stars are just fiery stones set in the sky?”

        “Fiery stones, huh. No, can’t say we’ve heard much about that in Pingli.”

        Hulin flushes. “I mean, not that I believe them. I just think it’s fascinating because... well, before I came here I wanted to study at the Academy.” His gaze drops to his shoes. “Stars and comets. That type of thing.”

        I look him up and down. “You’d look good with a scholar’s beard,” I conclude, and Hulin’s cheeks flare up with color again, round and red as apples.

* * *

        At the temple I am greeted by a swarm of outstretched hands and sun-scorched faces, followed by a more subdued reception from the wealthier attendees, who merely rustle their fans in acknowledgment, porcelain bodies enshrined within the folds of their palanquins. They’ve poured into the city from all sides and provinces, scaling walls, tearing down gates, trampling those too weak to stand on two feet, all for a glimpse of the gods’ chosen Elect. But our wagon parts this press of bodies as if shearing through the surface of a quiet, glassy sea.

        A woman catches my eye. I don’t know why. There is nothing remarkable about her weathered brown face in this mob where all faces are weathered and some shade of brown. I stretch out my hand to hers and, mimicking a gesture I must have observed at a holy festival, touch the tip of my middle finger to her palm. Others eagerly push forward. I reach all those I can. Crooked old men. Sagging young women. Grubby-cheeked children perched on their parents’ shoulders. They drape silk ribbons in plum and ruby and dusty pink across my extended arm and shower me with creamy white magnolia blossoms, fistfuls of fragrant frangipani.

        “Don’t encourage them,” my mother sniffs. “It... it is not becoming of an Elect.”

        “She means it’s cruel to get their hopes up,” my father chimes in from the bottom of the wagon. “They think one little touch will shield them from the pox.”

        My mother scowls.

        I twine a rose-colored ribbon about my finger and continue to touch as many hands as I can. The odds are that by the time we reach the temple I’ll have contracted the plum pox, and then hopefully I’ll be dead in three days’ time—sweaty, swollen, but without the hole in my chest.

* * *

        The comb cleaves a part down the center of my head before sinking into the snarls of thick black hair that hang past my shoulder blades, grazing the soft skin underneath. So, I muse, this is what it’s like to be scalped. Thank goodness I can add that to my list of life experiences.

        A flock of attendants flutter around me, prodding at me as if I am a prized pig about to go up for auction. They are all female and only a few years older than me. Apparently that is not enough to make them view me with any kind of sisterly sympathy. They scrub and pluck and perfume my skin without mercy, and when I try and meet their eyes, they only scowl.

        “Perhaps there has been a mistake,” the eldest girl whispers.

        “There must be,” says a second. “She’s so dark.”

        “Dark and coarse,” a third murmurs in agreement, inspecting my hands with a critical eye. “A bad omen.”

        “Bad enough to send me packing back to Pingli?” I snap, yanking my hand away. The third girl recoils, as if a hairy black spider might come crawling out of my open mouth.

        “What is this talk of omens?” the shaman says, appearing suddenly in the doorway.

        The girls press together, dipping their heads and muttering apologies.

        But the eldest girl decides to press her luck. “Master, look at her—”

        The shaman’s baton cracks across the girl’s cheek. After watching that bamboo rod dangle from his belt for so long I was beginning to wonder about its use.

        “She is the Elect,” he rasps as the girl shrinks back amongst her sisters. “Chosen and without blemish in the eyes of the gods. But, like a diamond in the rough—” He forces my chin up with his soot-stained fingers. “We strip away the excess.”

        I try to remember how the pox is spread. Vapors, I recall vaguely, evil spirits expelled through the mouth. I force a violent, sputtering cough up my throat, dusting the shaman in a fine shower of spit.

        The girls collectively take a step back. I brace for the sting of the baton on my cheek, but it never comes. Instead, the shaman takes in a long, even breath and grabs me by the hair. I claw at his hand as he drags me down the hall, spitting like a cat with its foot caught in a trap.

        “Unfortunate that we found you so late in the lunar cycle,” he says as he deposits me on the floor of a small square room with rice-paper walls. “If tonight had been a full moon I’d have had you carved up like a suckling pig an hour ago.”

        The last thing I see is a sliver of Hulin’s pale face and the tremor of his hand on the latch before the door slams shut. At first I can’t make sense of his fear—after all, he’s not the one staring down the shaman’s baton. Then I realize with a jolt that Hulin’s alarm is not for himself but for me. Because he knows from experience when the shaman is making idle threats and when he is simply stating facts.

* * *

        When the door opens again three days later I don’t know which is more disappointing—the fact that I am still alive or the fact that the shaman’s face is just as pox-free as mine.

* * *

        It turns out the only way to purify the body after an early deflowering—as the shamans fondly refer to the alleged event—is to stew it (me) like a starchy vegetable.

        “This is going to make the meat awfully tough,” I say, tapping my sternum.

        The attendant shushes me. I shrug, sinking into the steaming tub. I’m supposed to use this time for thinking—which I am, just not about my souls. This is a temple, I remind myself, not a fortress. I stare dismally down at my face reflected back in the dark bathwater, conscious of the attendant’s eyes. Of course, escape would be much easier if I wasn’t constantly surrounded by shamans and scholars and Hulin’s big eyes and slack-jawed mouth. Every scenario I conjure up only ends in more guards and more locked doors. So it’s not a fortress, I think, but it’s certainly a prison, designed to keep things in not out. I guess the shamans worry their gods might get tired of squatting on their golden altars all day and one sunny afternoon, just walk away.

        Can’t say I blame them. The circular hall where the Pantheon resides is always miserably stuffy. Time here passes as a shapeless blur of prayers, recitations, and lengthy lectures on various lofty subjects. Apparently the shamans want me to be familiar with the gods I am being offered to, which I think is a thoughtful gesture. It gives the whole affair an intimacy that I think most ritual murder lacks. The names prove too numerous for me to keep track of. Back in Pingli Province we had the Jewel-Eyed Five, plus the little shrine to the Immortal Mothers, which I never lit a candle to because it felt odd to pray to my sister. But here there are dozens, hundreds, endless Tians and Nus and Jade Empresses displayed in a circle so that none appear favored over the others, from Lei, the garish, green goddess of laughter, whose name you cannot speak without a smile, to the stout old Steward with his curved bull’s horns.

        I smother a giggle. This is my fifth lesson of the day. I try to focus on the large words the scholar’s mouth is forming, but my eyes keep slipping to the fresco on the far wall. It depicts the Great Battle of the Chengzi River, and the river god himself stands front and center, fully disrobed for the occasion, every last inch of his dripping chiseled physique etched into the walls in painstaking detail.

        “Is something funny?” the scholar asks, thick, black brows dipping down into his eyes.

        My mother stands by the door, watching. She looks ill.

        “Oh, no,” I say, mopping at the corners of my eyes with my sleeve. “It’s just... I’ve never seen Chengzi depicted with such a... such a studied hand. So... anatomically detailed.”

        “Enough.” The scholar throws down his slate. “My efforts are wasted on this matter.”

        The shaman appears, as always, as if he stepped straight from the shadows. “She is the Elect,” he insists. “The gods do not make mistakes, nor do their signs.”

        “Yes,” the scholar agrees. “But surely the readers of these signs are capable of error.”

        A muscle in the shaman’s jaw twitches. The moment the scholar exits the hall, the shaman darts forward. I shriek as the baton snaps across my cheek once, twice, each flecking my vision with amorphous color.

        “First you dishonor your body!” he rages, “then your family, then me, and now the gods. Do you think you are above this? Do you not realize that there are thousands of girls who pray night and day for a blessing such as yours? An opportunity such as yours?”

        I desperately shield my head with my arms as the baton cracks across my stomach, too short of breath now to cry out. They need me, I repeat over and over again, like a mantra, drowning out my own panic, they cannot let me die, they need me. But through my muss of hair I catch sight of the shaman’s cool black eyes—black but with trace amounts of amber, like hot embers—and as the baton descends again and again and again, I realize with paralyzing certainty that he will not stop until he has proven his point—proven that he could kill me, if he liked, here and now, Elect or not. Just because he wants to. Just because he can.

        My mother screams, swaying as if nearing a faint. The other scholars who had previously been cowering on the far side of the room gallantly rush to her aid with fans and pitchers of water. The shaman’s grip grows slack and then he lets go of me altogether. I drop to the floor in an unceremonious heap of tangled hair and twisted robes. Hulin rushes to my side and eases me upright with a hand placed lightly in the middle of my back.

        “Are you alright?” he asks quietly, seeing my shoulders shake. But it isn’t until he brushes my hair back from my face that he realizes the wet rattle in my chest isn’t a struggle to breathe but, rather, laughter. My mother leans into a pillar, speechless. She thinks I’ve gone mad, and maybe I have. As I look up into the shaman’s deep smoldering eyes I realize, in the first true moment of genius in my entire life, that I have all the means of escape right here, ricocheting around my brain, rockets just waiting to be ignited.

* * *

        In the morning I say an impassioned prayer to Chengzi and his abnormally large pectoral muscles and then set about on my quest to be thoroughly insufferable.

        I blow bubbles in my bathwater, bounce my leg constantly during meditations, and snort incense fumes to see if they can actually get you loopy (they cannot, but the sticks do make the inside of your nostrils all tingly). My mother is beside herself with humiliation. The shaman drops the serene exterior of the spiritual authority. He spits his words, and his face is constantly red and pinched from the swell of barely contained righteous fury just beneath the surface.

        “I’ll have your mouth sewn shut,” he whispers into my ear. “I’ll have your lips sealed together with hot wax.”

        I yawn, stirring my tea with my pinkie. “Stole that line from my mother, didn’t you?” Amber liquid sloshes over the rim of the cup, soaking the front of the shaman’s robes. “Oops,” I say, almost languidly, rolling up my sleeve and extending my arm in preparation for the descent of the shaman’s baton. But now we both know that his arm will wear out long before my resolve.

        It gives me comfort, tracing the ugly purple welts on my skin as I lie on my sleeping mat at night. I think of them like medals or maybe tattoos, and when one starts to fade I can’t help but cry—even with my guards no doubt listening at the door outside—because these marks are mine and it’s like losing a part of me. I might as well have beaten them into my skin myself.

* * *

        “You need to do what they say.”

        I wobble about the perimeter of the temple’s garden, ignoring the groan and sway of the bamboo, the distant lapping of water, the trill of a bird in the nearby wisteria tree. Each shuffling step requires my full attention, what with the stones the shaman has strapped to my slippers. They’re a metaphor for my divinely appointed task, and a rather ham-fisted one at that.

        “Bi, did you hear me?” Hulin presses, glancing anxiously over his shoulder. One hand is fixed on the hilt of his sword, the other holding my parasol aloft, presumably to shield my delicate skin from the milky sunlight that occasionally leaks through the clouds. “You need to start behaving or else—”

        “Or else what?” I say through my teeth. “They’ll kill me?”

        “They could cast you aside,” he whispers, and his voice is pleading.

        “Well, they’re welcome to do it.” I take another tottering step, bracing against the wind. It claws straight through my thin robe. “Tits on a stick, it’s cold!”

        A scholar emerges from a nearby plot of orchids where he had evidently been meditating. He shoves past us in a huff, clutching his cushion under his arm.

        But Hulin’s eyes are wide and bright with curiosity. “Do all girls in Pingli talk like you?”

        “Haven’t you heard?” I say, shuffling forward again. “There are no girls in Pingli.”

        Technically it’s true. In the records there are no girls, at least not by name; only small black dots denoting the presence of sisters, wives, mothers. I remember as a child watching the census-taker scratch my father’s name onto his little slate, and below that our three dots, arranged like tea kettles on a shelf. One of the dots was slightly smeared, almost like a little face with two braids set on opposite sides. I like to imagine this was me.

        Hulin misses the joke, but he laughs anyway. “You’re a funny girl,” he says, falling in step behind me, then repeats under his breath, “A funny girl.”

* * *

        One of the temple girls—the one the shaman struck—has caught the pox. They whisk her away to another location before she even shows her first spot. Her sisters’ accusatory stares burn into the back of my head as they jerk the comb through my hair the next morning, but since the moon is still waxing crescent, my heart stays lodged in my chest (though I try not to think about the alternative, except in a purely hypothetical sense). It’s easier to forget why I’m here now that my mother has taken to napping more frequently and Hulin is my friend. You’d think he’d take advantage of such a captive audience, but I do most of the talking during our garden strolls.

        “Then the woman carves out the ox’s eyes and sticks them into her husband’s bloodied sockets,” I say breathlessly, due to the fact that Kuen’s chunky arms are locked around my neck. He’s mercifully fallen asleep, but now I have to drag this drooling sack of flour around in addition to my stones. “And for the first time in his life the man opens his eyes and looks upon the face of the love of his life. That’s why they say lovers are ‘ox-eyed’ for one another.”

        Hulin laughs. “We never had stories like this where I grew up. We had ‘divine histories’—Chengzi slaughtering the thirty thousand, the Jade Empress mixing the love elixir for Wei-Li, Feihong journeying across the oceans...”

        “The gods are the subject of shadow puppetry,” I say dismissively. “Fantastical characters who feud and fuck and spread misery as often as they do good fortune. We tell stories about them to little children, and not even good stories.” Good stories meaning stories about farmers’ wives with slit-open bellies sprouting apple trees in the back garden.

        “You should have been a poet,” Hulin observes.

        “Believe me,” I say, adjusting my grip on Kuen. “If I could make a decent living sitting by a creek and writing three-line stanzas about grasshoppers all day, I would.”

        “It’s hard to think of a better life purpose than to create beautiful things out of nothing.”

        Now that’s a surprise. In fact, it might be the first profound thing I’ve ever heard Hulin say.

        I shift my attention back to my feet, ignoring Kuen’s hot breaths on my neck. “My sister used to say all women are born artists. To us, ‘there is nothing more natural than creation.’”

        “Your sister sounds very wise.”

        Something in Hulin’s inflection suggests that he is about to offer his condolences, so I cut in with the first question that comes to mind. “So, the Academy, huh. What happened to that?”

        Perhaps there are better ways I could have phrased this, but I’m too desperate to change the subject. Anyway, Hulin has apparently convinced himself that my general lack of tact is not a character defect but rather a part of my natural charm.

        “My brothers are there now,” he says, smiling fondly at Kuen. “But I’m the youngest and my father thought he should, you know, give something back—to the ones who made us.”

        For what? I think. In the shadows of the wisteria I think I see my sister’s face, the way her kind eyes and fine cheekbones looked shrouded in the black folds of her widow’s veil. “Don’t you see, Bi?” she once said so serenely, smoothing her hand over the slight curve of her swollen belly. “It’s a gift. When they take, they always give us something in return.”

        “Nah,” I say, folding my arms around Kuen. “We don’t owe the gods a damn thing.”

* * *

        “What are you doing?” my mother asks from across the hall, tearing her eyes away from Lei’s glittering green stare. She must have sensed the shift in my breathing from steady inhales and exhales to faint, whistling snores.

        I rub at my eyes with my sleeve. “What does it look like? I’m resting.”

        She storms across the hall to swat at me with her fan. Kuen laughs from his blanket nearby on the floor. “You are supposed to be clearing your mind. You must be a clean slate for the gods to write their will upon and... and anyway, you have the nights to sleep all you want.”

        “Not anymore,” I say through my teeth. “Because now our dear holy man has gotten into the habit of sitting outside my door muttering incantations until the sun comes up.”

        He’s been at it ever since they carried out the third girl.

                My mother’s grip is so tight it crumples the paper of her fan. Faint beads of perspiration line her forehead. Something about the light here gives her skin an ashen quality.

        “I don’t understand you,” she says. “Everyone here is so generous, so kind. We have a roof and good clothes and more food than we can eat and—and you should be more grateful, Bi, grateful!”

        I push myself to my feet. “That’s not what Baba says. He says we all end up in the same place at the end of the day, so it really doesn’t matter what the hell I do—”

        “Your father,” she spits, “only says those things because he’s allowed to wallow in all life’s disappointments and curse the gods for his lot. Because he has the luxury to be weak.”

        She claps a hand to her mouth—that small, steady hand whose creases and callouses used to fascinate me so much when I was a child. Her bottom lip quivers. She stands before me small and shrunken. Like crumpled paper.

        I reach for her hand, which is cool and limp, and whisper, “It’s okay. I won’t tell.”

        She pulls away, mopping the sweat from her pale cheeks with her sleeve, stirring the air with her fan. “It’s very... very hot in here, don’t you think?”

        I frown. The windows are open today. “Mama, maybe you should lie down for a bit.”

        She takes an unsteady step forward. “Yes. A rest. That sounds so...”

        And she tips over like a jug of water, spilling out across the floor. Shamans and guards and scholars flood into the hall at my calls. They descend on my mother the way crows do, and the effect is made all the worse by the way their drooping sleeves and silly tassels flutter in the breeze from the open window. I hear Kuen wailing somewhere far across the hall, pushed to the side and forgotten, and underneath that I hear the word “pox” and then the shaman’s sharp commands: “Get the Elect out. Get her out.”

        Hulin locks his arms around my waist and hoists me into the air with more strength than I realized he possessed, ignoring every curse I throw at him. I can see my mother’s open hand on the floor through the tangle of bodies, the strain of the muscles as she grasps at the air. Someone has the decency to slip the crumpled fan back into her damp fingers.

* * *

        The shaman will not let me within ten feet of my mother in her current condition, so I watch the progression of the crusted red spots up her arms and around her throat through a crack in the door. A snuffling sound reminds me that my father is here in the corridor, too, in the same spot where he has sat for the past two days, watching the masked healers flurry in and out. It’s not his swollen eyes or his inability to put a full sentence together that alarms me. It’s the fact that for the first time in years, I am certain he is stone-cold sober.

        “Bi, I can’t go back after this,” he whispers. “She’ll be in the walls, the floor, the trees, the fields. She’ll be waiting for me...”

        I smooth Kuen’s black hair over his round, little head. He will not let my father touch him while he’s in such a state, recoiling at the sight of his inflated red face.

        Hulin sneaks a furtive glance at the shaman. “Do you want me to carry him for a bit?”

        “No,” I murmur, moving my hand up and down, up and down. “It’s fine.”

        A terrible image flashes before my eyes of Kuen’s face poxed and scarred; my father and I watching him writhe in his cradle, just waiting for him to die. I pull his face closer to mine, this face that, at this proximity and if the light hits it just right, carries echoes of my sister’s.

        “What are we going to do?” my father says hoarsely. “Bi, without her I’m—I’m not—”

        “It’s okay, Baba,” I say. “You don’t have to say it.”

        He looks to me, wide-eyed and grateful. “You are so much like her, you know.”

        I turn away, watching an attendant dab at my mother’s cracked lips with a damp cloth. “No. Everyone knows I take after you.”

        No wonder the pain is so deeply wedged into my chest. It’s like watching five deaths all in one. Or maybe just one five times over.

* * *

        It’s easy to revisit a memory like Kuen’s birthday. Every last little detail has been carved into my brain—the stale stench of sweat, the grating hum of the cicadas, my father’s fading footsteps as he raced off in search of another healer, one who wouldn’t give up.

        “It’s not so bad,” my sister assured me, her head propped against my knee. Her skin was stretched across her bones. All the color in her face had been soaked up by the heap of blood-stained towels in the far corner of the room.

        “It’s not so bad,” she said again, seeking out my hand with her own. A smile tugged at her lips. “At least not so bad as it looks. Anyway, it’s easy for me to go because I know he won’t be alone. You had me and... he’ll have you.”

        My mouth opened, closed. I wanted to pull away, but I couldn’t unclasp my hand from hers. Something cool and slimy unspooled in my stomach and I couldn’t figure out why. This moment—the dying moment—was nothing I hadn’t seen before in tales told by puppets and on folded paper, tales told with relish by my own lips to any willing (or unwilling) ear near enough to listen.

        “Bi, you promise, don’t you?” she said. “To love him as I would have loved him?”

        She could have asked me a thousand things; demanded a thousand feats, each more fantastical than the next. One word from her and I would journey across strange seas to the edge of the world, sing and dance until my feet bled and fell off, grow flowers so big and bursting with color and fragrance that even the gods in their heavenly gardens looked on them with envy. But instead I watched her expend precious minutes asking again and again for the one thing that would always be impossible.

        “Of course she does,” my mother sweeps in, taking my sister’s other hand. “We both do.”

        Vaguely I remember nodding. At the time, it was the best I could do.

* * *

        When a hand is pressed over my mouth, my instinctive reaction is to clamp my teeth down on that hand—hard.

        “Hey—ouch! Bi, it’s me.”

        The dull outline of a face emerges from the darkness. “Hulin?” I croak.

        “Don’t talk,” Hulin whispers as he drags me to my feet. He throws a heavy shawl over my bony shoulders and ushers me out into the hall. My feet stumble over the uneven stones, over the slumped form of the other guard who is supposed to be on watch tonight. I rub at my eyes still heavy with sleep, as if to clear away the fog hanging over my brain and keeping me from asking any sensible questions.

        “Hulin, where are we—”

        “Shh,” he hisses, pressing a hand to my mouth.

        But by the time we reach the Pantheon’s hall, I throw it off. “Hulin, what the hell is this?”

        He blinks at me as if it’s obvious. “We’re running away.”

        “Running away?” I’m suddenly conscious of the cold stare of a hundred dead divine eyes forming a circle around us. Moonlight cuts through the open windows, painting pale streaks across faces once beatific that are now twisted, distorted, grotesque.

        “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” Hulin says and grins. “Just like the stories. But we don’t have much time before the others realize—”

        “I can’t.”

        He grips me by the shoulders. “Bi, it’s nearly the full moon. We’re out of time.”

        “Hulin, wait.” My feet slide across the tiles as he drags me across the hall. I yank at his hand. “Stop! Stop or I’ll... I’ll scream!”

        He rounds on me, leveling his eyes with mine. “What is holding you back?”

        “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I—I just can’t—not after—”

        Over his shoulders, the Jade Empress returns my stare. Red ribbons twine about her fingers—to simulate the moment she pulled Nu out from between her legs with her own two hands, since Wei-Li certainly didn’t stick around to do it. They match the red curl of her smile.

        Hulin’s expression softens. “It’s your mother, isn’t it? She’s gone, Bi. And I know she meant a lot to you, but you meant more to her. Wouldn’t she want you to get out if you could? To live on, like the ox-eyed lovers—”

        “But life isn’t like the stories,” I cut in. “You can’t take another volume off the shelf when you tire of the first, can’t bind it up with ribbons when the pages start to fall out—”

        Hulin yanks me toward him and presses his mouth against mine. Several seconds pass before I realize that we are kissing; at first I can only register the sensation as vaguely wet. When Hulin pulls away his face is flushed and his gaze certain. He frowns when he doesn’t see the same expression in mine.

        “Like I said,” I say quietly. “Not like the stories.”

        “How sweet,” calls a familiar voice. We jerk apart as the shaman emerges from the Steward’s broad shadow. The black pits beneath his tired eyes extend the pupils, making them impossibly dark, drowning out the amber. He still wears his daytime robes, the corded belt with the bamboo rod knotted about his narrow waist. At his signal, the rest of the guards file through the far door, forming a tight ring around the perimeter of the room.

        “How very sweet,” the shaman says again as he eyes each silent statue. His lips twist into a smile, or perhaps a sneer. “But perhaps inappropriate for our present company, don’t you think?”

        With an accompanying chink Hulin whips his sword free of its scabbard.

        “Don’t,” I say, tugging at his hand, but he pushes me behind him, brows pressed together in fierce concentration. For the first time, I believe that he actually knows how to use his weapon.

        The shaman’s tongue slips across his lips. “This will not end like you think.”

        “Please.” I give Hulin’s hand another desperate pull. “Don’t do this. Not for me, not for—”

        “Stay behind me,” Hulin says, his sword arm steady. He mutters a prayer to Nu, though I can’t tell if he is invoking him as patron of youth or patron of untimely death.

        “Shit,” I mutter, and the familiar far wall has never looked so flat, so final, “Shit—”

        I cut myself short. Something small and red in a statue’s cupped hand catches my eye. Wedged between Lei and a much more subdued interpretation of Chengzi cut from white marble is the figure of a woman carved from a deep, rich cedar wood that I don’t remember being there before. She wears an impish, self-satisfied smile. I can’t tell what the red thing in her hands is, but on closer inspection I see that her eyes are black pearls, twin pools of deep liquid black.

        Breaking free of Hulin’s grip, I glide across the tiled floor, transfixed. The shaman’s eyes dart between me and the wooden face of this strange god whose name I can’t seem to recall. But as the distance between us halves, then quarters, I realize it doesn’t matter. There is something in the contours of her face—in the faint crow’s feet on either side of her eyes, in that sly smile—that I recognize just as I would my father’s loping gait at a distance or the bruised back of my hand. This face is older and I like to think wiser, but it is still my own face staring back at me.

        I study the fine wrinkles that line the mouth, moving down to the folds of her robe, the sleeves pushed up past her elbows. Someone has placed a red apple in the statue’s hands, which are curled close to her chest. An offering, I suppose. I pick it up, rubbing at the waxy skin with the corner of my sleeve, and laugh aloud because there is something my mother was always trying to tell me that now I finally understand.

        As I turn the apple over I murmur, “You’ll look after him, won’t you?”

        The black-eyed goddess stares serenely back at me.

        “Good. That’s good.” I turn to the shaman. “The moon is full?”

        “Waning gibbous,” he corrects with a dignified sniff, as if I hadn’t already made up my mind about him being an insufferable prick.

        “Full enough,” I say coldly and raise the apple to my lips. In the moment that follows the only sounds are the gentle ksh-ksh of the wind in the trees outside, the groan of the rafters overhead, and my own furious chewing as I take bite after bite. The shaman is too bewildered to scold me for snacking on sacrificial fruit, which I suppose, in my case, is a bit like cannibalism. His jaw twitches as he watches me return the apple core to the statue’s waiting hands and wipe my sticky palms on my shift.

        “Thank you,” I murmur to the statue, and then to the shaman, “Do you know the story of the Nuying Woman and the old apple tree?”

        He blinks. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him at a loss for words. “I... faintly recall it.”

        I slump against the base of Chengzi’s likeness, resting my head on a bulging calf muscle. A bit of apple skin is caught between my teeth. I pry it out with two fingers.

        “Well,” I begin, only a little smug, “the Nuying Woman is a practical person. Not prone to sentimentality. So, of course, she marries a farmer.” I grimace slightly at the funny taste of bitter fruit at the back of my mouth. “Anyhow, skip ahead a few decades and she’s lying on her deathbed and she can’t help but think how depressing a place a coffin is—just four walls and a bit of damp earth—as if death wasn’t already enough of a nuisance—”

        I frown down at my chest where the skin has begun to ripple and bubble at the surface. “You know, I’ll just cut to the chase. The farmer fetches a nice, sturdy paring knife and... and...”

        The shaman’s eyes dart between my face and the statue. Suddenly they triple in size. “No,” he rasps. “Not her. The gods can’t choose her. Anyone but her—”

        A cry, a shout, the rush of slippered feet on cold stone floors. Before I can tip over onto the ground a dozen hands hold me aloft. Eventually they set me down in a small, square chamber that I do not recognize. A hole has been cut into the ceiling, letting a bit of pale, watery moonlight leak in. My stomach roils as something inside strains to get out, like tiny fists beating against the underside of my sternum. Voices pass over me, tripping over one another in their panic, though the shaman is loudest of all.

        “The moon—look—it’s too early—”

        “There’s no time—”

        “Cut it out! Cut it out!”

        On my left and right are my mother and sister, coarse hands, brown faces.

        “It’s the best I could do,” I tell them.

        My sister squeezes my hand. “I think it’s beautiful.”

        Somewhere far away are the holy men’s voices, the hiss of metal on metal, last-moment recitations and prayers. One of the scholars pleads for my eyes to be covered, but I beat him to it, letting them roll back into my head. As I catch a final glimpse of the shaman’s thin face I smile.

* * *

        The shaman’s hands are red and dripping, but not from the lump of muscle he clutches—one might say, cradles—in his cupped palms. Instead its flesh is wrinkled and brittle, stiff and scaly as tree bark, its veins threaded with green.

        And bursting from the heart’s center—a sprout.

Copyright © 2020 Erin Eisenhour

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Erin Eisenhour lives in Springfield, Missouri with her family, pets, and disgruntled houseplants. She received bachelor’s degrees in creative writing and history from the University of Tulsa, where she also studied violin. Her work has appeared in Stylus Journal of Art and Writing; in 2020, her submission was awarded Best Screenplay. Find her on Twitter at @ErinEisenhour, or drop by her blog at erineisenhour.tumblr.com.

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COVER ART

“Grassy Ocean,” by Alexander Ostrowski

Alexander Ostrowski is a freelance creature designer and concept artist based in Germany. Since childhood, he spent far too much time thinking about dragons and looking for crabs on the beach. Fascinated by nature and biology, he still loves exploring the real world as well as imaginary ones and especially the lifeforms both have to offer. As a concept artist, he is mainly designing creatures for the entertainment industry. You can find his work online on Artstation and on Instagram @ostrowskialex.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

ISSN: 1946-1076

Published by Firkin Press,

a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

Compilation Copyright © 2020 Firkin Press

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